3.7.09

The Tenth Planet

The Tenth Planet is a serial in the British science fiction television series Doctor Who, which was first broadcast in four weekly parts from 8 October to 29 October 1966. It was William Hartnell's last regular appearance as the First Doctor, and the first story to feature the Cybermen. Patrick Troughton also makes his first, uncredited appearance as the Second Doctor.

The Doctor and his companions Ben and Polly arrive in the TARDIS at the South Pole in the year 1986, near the Snowcap base. The base is supervising the mission of the Zeus IV spaceship, running a routine probe on the Earth's atmosphere.

For an 'in depth' look at this story, go to;

http://www.bbc.co.uk/doctorwho/classic/episodeguide/tenthplanet/

The last episode of this serial is missing. It is possibly the most sought-after of the missing episodes, because it contains the historic first regeneration scene (even though a low-quality, truncated copy of this sequence survives and is held in the BBC Archives), and also because it is William Hartnell's final episode. In fact, it is included in a list of the ten most wanted missing programmes, alongside the BBC studio footage from the Apollo 11 landings (which is currently held only in soundtrack form).

Popular myth has it that the only surviving telerecording copy of the fourth episode was lost when loaned out to the children's programme Blue Peter in 1973 when they wished to use a clip from it in a feature on the tenth anniversary of Doctor Who. Although a print of The Daleks' Master Plan Episode 4 ("The Traitors") was loaned to Blue Peter and not returned to the BBC Film Library, there was never a copy of The Tenth Planet Episode 4 there to have been loaned. Another department – BBC Enterprises – was still offering all four episodes for sale to foreign broadcasters until the end of the following year and would not, in any case, have loaned out master negatives.

In 1992, a man named Roger K. Barrett (later revealed to be an alias) claimed to have a videotape recording of episode four of this story, and offered to sell it to the BBC. Before this was revealed as a hoax, the BBC produced a special introduction for an intended VHS release of the story, hosted by Michael Craze; two versions of which were filmed: one explaining that episode four was still missing, the other introducing the story as if it were complete.

The story was eventually released on VHS in 2000 from BBC Video as "Doctor Who: The Cybermen Box Set: The Tenth Planet and Attack of the Cybermen" double-tape set for its United Kingdom release (both stories were released individually in the United States & Canada in 2001), with the fourth episode to "The Tenth Planet" reconstructed by the Doctor Who Restoration Team using still photos, existing clips and the surviving audio soundtrack. Here is the VHS and CD soundtrack;

The existing clips from the missing final episode – 8 mm film recordings made by fans – were included in the DVD release Lost in Time in 2004. The only surviving clip of the regeneration was also released as a special feature on the DVD releases for The Three Doctors and Castrovalva.

Here is a clip from YouTube;

The soundtracks for The Tenth Planet and The Invasion, put together from fan-made recordings, along with a bonus disc, The Origins of the Cybermen, an audio essay by Cyberman actor David Banks, were released on CD in a collector's tin called Doctor Who: Cybermen. A CD of stock music used in this serial was released in 2000.

The DWM index is at LovingWho;

http://www.lovingwho.com/DWMIndex/Television/WilliamHartnell.html

A novelisation of this serial, written by Gerry Davis, was published by Target Books in February 1976. It was the first Hartnell-era serial novelisation to be commissioned by Target, and the first new adaptation of a Hartnell adventure to be published in nearly ten years. It would take until 1990 for the complete First Doctor era to be novelised.

The novelisation largely follows the original script and so places the action in the year 2000 as well as restoring the Doctor to the third episode.